Recent advances in wireless and network technologies have enabled a wide range of applications for wireless sensor networks that include target tracking, environment monitoring, industrial monitoring, health care monitoring and traffic surveillance. Traditionally, sensors (also referred to as relay or node) with limited computation power, gathered and transmitted information about an environment to a centralized repository. The transmission of information to a centralized repository from remote nodes typically involves enormous power consumption when the transmission happens over a wireless communication channel. However, over a period of time, nodes with additional computational capabilities were designed and the nodes were configured to transmit the gathered information to the centralized repository in the wireless sensor network by means of one or more hops.
Further, routing protocols were designed for transferring data in multihop wireless sensor network, wherein a shortest energy path between a source node and a sink node with optimal energy consumption was determined. However, such routing protocols often lead to uneven energy distribution in the multihop wireless sensor network. Moreover, nodes are usually battery-powered, and a potential node may often need to enter a sleep cycle to conserve energy. Consequently, a considerable overhead is required to be exchanged between the source node and the neighboring nodes in the multihop wireless sensor network. Furthermore, unreliable wireless links and network partition cause packet loss and require multiple retransmissions for a preselected sensible path.
Thus, there is a need for an efficient method for selecting a node for data transmission in a multihop wireless sensor network based on energy consumption and security of the node.